Autism, from the Greek word auto (self), was first described in 1943 by psychiatrist Leo Kanner: "This condition differs markedly and uniquely from anything reported so far...." said Kanner. Autistic children are totally self-absorbed and alienated-they are in their own world, detached, unresponsive, unable to relate to others, often mentally retarded, hyperactive and violently aggressive.

"This disorder is difficult to characterize, but a very prominent feature is the inability to relate to or communicate with other human beings in ways that are natural or meaningful," says Bernard Rimland, Ph.D., director of the Autism Research Institute. Rimland's 1964 book Infantile Autism - the Syndrome and It's Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior is credited with demolishing the idea that bad parenting or mental illness caused autism. "Autism is a biological disorder, not an emotional illness. Refuse psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and intensive counseling. These approaches are useless...," recommends Rimland. (From Autism, Journey Out Of Darkness by Karolyn A. Gazella (Health Counselor Magazine, Vol. 3 No. 6; June/July 1994)

Five out of 10,000 babies are autistic and it's cause is considered unknown. Although each autistic child is different, in general about 75% have some degree of mental retardation and another 10% are known as autistic savants. (Like the character Dustin Hoffman played in Rain Man). Now that emotional factors have been ruled out, experts are now looking for a brain malfunction caused by physical, chemical, or biological abnormalities. It's cause is a mystery.

But not to medical researcher and historian Harris Coulter, Ph.D. "The first victims of the medical assualt on the American brain were the austic children," says Dr. Coulter. "Austistics ordinarily suffer from a multitude disorders - mental retardation, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, and others - which are clearly of neurologic origin...autism [is] a neurological disorder....The first cases of autism emerged in the United States at a time when vaccination against whooping cough was becoming increasingly popular." (Vaccination Social Violence and Criminality, The Medical Assault on the American Brain by Harris Coulter, Ph.D. the following quotes of Coulter are from his book).

How does vaccination cause autism? The answer: encephalitis. Although encephalitis or "brain inflammation" can be caused by severe infection, trauma to the head and severe burns those occur rarely compared with post-vaccinal encephalitis - encephalitis following vaccination.

Autism (and minimal brain damage), while rare before mass vaccination programs began, are now widespread disorders. Coulter's claim that they are the result of post-encephalitic syndrome resulting from childhood vaccination should be disturbing to anyone with a child who has a learning disorder, is hyperactive, dyslexic, suffers from cranial nerve damage, or is, of course, autistic.

"Kanner was mistaken in thinking that autism differed from other diseases," says Coulter. "He may be excused for his error; he was not a neurologist but a psychiatrist. The symptoms Kenner called autism would have been immediately recognized by a neurologist as post-encephalitic syndrome."

Encephalitis was well known in the second and third decades of this century. Infectious encephalitis occurred in epidemic numbers - mental institutions and reform schools were the home of many "post encephalitic syndrome" individuals who were left with a wide variety of neurological conditions after the encephalitis ravaged their brains - creating conditions often identical to post-vaccine damage, among them autism.

"In examining the enormous literature on infectious encephalitis, I realized very quickly that the long-term effects of encephalitis is totally congruent with what we see today in the DSM3 of the American Psychological Association as "Disorders usually evident in infancy or childhood" (developmental disabilities). That includes autism, hyperactivity, dyslexia, attention span difficulties and several dozen other conditions."

"This is, at first glance, a startling omission," says Coulter. When the neurologic (as opposed to psychological) nature of autism was finally revealed, "mental health professionals should have immediately appreciated the tie with encephalitis. Furthermore, it had long been known that a variety of encephalitis was caused by vaccination. But this is precisely why physicians shied away from the topic! Since no one wanted to impugn the [vaccination] programs, encephalitis was never discussed openly and fully.

"The Vaccine Compensation Bill of 1986 provided for the establishment of a committee under the The National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine to review data on vaccine damage. This committee has published two books - one in 1989 and one in 1993 on the damage of various vaccines and they have stated in the first of these books that the evidence supports the existence of a causal relationship between the DPT vaccine and encephalitis. That has changed the whole terms of the debate because now you can talk of vaccine damage in terms of encephalitis - that is a much more solid scientific basis.

"But no biological phenomenon is either all or nothing. Vaccination cannot be considered to either leave a child perfectly normal or have a very severe impact on a child. There's got to be a range of effects - how about the children in the middle? How about those who are slightly affected by the vaccine? Anybody who knows anything about the biology of medicine knows that this has to be because it would be impossible to stress a large group of people, like two million babies a year in the United States and not have the reactions go along a whole range of effects....Some of the side effects or long term affects make themselves felt not the next week or two weeks later but five or ten years later when the parent realizes that their child is not acting or behaving like other children act and tries to figure out what the reason for that is...."

The numbers of damaged children we are dealing with appear to be very high. Although medical authorities may claim that perhaps "one child in hundreds of thousands of children are in any way affected by vaccination " that may be a pathetic underestimation.

For example, in the first book to seriously attack the medical myth of vaccine safety, DPT: A Shot In The Dark Coulter and Fisher estimate that 12,000-15,000 cases of severe neurological damage are caused by childhood vaccines each year. However those numbers pale beside Coulter's statement that "one child in five or six is affected to some degree by the vaccination...about 20% of the population.... "

When some researchers investigate this information they are led to state, as does Viera Scheibner Ph.D. in her incredible book, Vaccination: The Medical Assault on the Immune System, (one of the greatest anti-vaccination books written to date): "Vaccination is the epitome of ignorance and the unscientific approach to illness....Immunizations, including those practiced on babies, not only did not prevent any infectious diseases, they caused more suffering and more deaths than has any other human activity in the entire history of medical intervention. It will be decades before the mopping-up after the disasters caused by childhood vaccination will be completed. All vaccination should cease forthwith and all victims of their side-effects should be appropriately compensated."

Let us close with Dr. Coulter, who reminds us that this subject is difficult to discuss, in spite of the evidence: "Awareness of the relationship between these neurological disabilities and the post-encephalitic syndrome has been blocked...by reluctance to admit that the childhood vaccination program is the only possible cause of a mass epidemic of clinical and sub-clinical encephalitis."

What will you think the next time you see a deaf child signing, a child in a wheel chair or a hyperactive child? Bad luck, bad genes or bad vaccines?

For more information on these topics the above mentioned books:
Vaccination, Social Violence and Criminality ($14.95) by Harris Coulter,
Ph.D. A Shot in the Dark ($9.95) by Fisher and Coulter and Vaccination,
The Medical Assault on the Immune System ($30.00) by Viera Scheibner,
Ph.D. are available from Koren Publications, 2026 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103, 1-800-537-3001. Please add $4.50 shipping and handling per total order.